Famed cattleprod-launcher firm Taser International has diversified out of its core business in electric stun weapons. The firm has announced that it will soon release a "family safety platform" allowing parents to monitor their children's mobile phone use, location and driving.
The parental spy/control tech is called "Protector …

COMMENTS

Empowers Parents?

So....here is a product that lets you spy on your kids more so you can stress out about every little move they make and still just be told to 'f--- off or I'll stab you' if you mention any of their behaviour....

wow !

Or just keep them in, chained to your ankle the whole time. That'll learn them !!

Those people look scary on the website - can I sign up please, in case I have kids sometime in the future ? I may be pregnant now for all I know (I'm not buying this media conspiracy that only females can have kids...)

What utter shite. Still, what else to expect from the "Land of the Free"....

Not only helicopter parents

will benefit from this. What's the bet that companies will start issuing their employees (those that require mobiles) with phones subject to the same system? What this is doing is teaching kids to expect being monitored, spied on, controlled and regulated throughout their lives.

To those helicopter parents who are so paranoid, I say YOU are the primary reason our civil liberties are being eroded away. If you're so terrified your little precious might get hurt, maybe you shouldn't have had them. No wonder kids today are so rebellious and anti-social. You reap what you sow.

Indeed...

I seem to remember reading an article on another website called The Register that claimed that today's youth have six times the mental health issues children in the great depression had. Now I never was good at connect the dots but I wonder....

How to reduce your child's mobile usage and alienate them in one simple move

No self-respecting person of any age would submit to this sort of intrusion and nor should they.

Any child with more than two brain cells to rub together would just leave the phone at home and use a different one.

I have three children and I have an alternative solution to this. How about talking to them? Perhaps if your children trust you they will tell you what they are doing.

If I had found out my parents were spying on me like this, I doubt I ever would have spoken to them again. Technology is no substitute for parenting. How long before Taser et al offer an outsourced parenting solution, probably offshored to Mumbai.

LOL

Greetings young Simon,

I am Wayne and I will be being your father today. Your vequest for permissionings to be skateboardings with your friends is declined, as your TaserBrush is telling me you have not be cleaning your tooths today! Please do the needful and revert ASAP.

Thankyou for your co-operation, I will now be making you connection to my colleague Kevin, who is responsibles for the CCTV in your bedroom and will assess tidiness before you can leave.

happy girlhood days

I used to head out on my bike for a whole day, or even days. Before mobile phones or anything. My parents explained the dangers of 'odd' strangers and nasty men, of being brave and sensible when hurt, of not being stupid when climbing trees, etc., but 'if duffers, better drowned; if not duffers, won't drown' was their attitude. So I and my siblings learned to repair our own bikes, get back home after dark, make treehouses, build rafts, play with other children unsupervised and unwatched, fight our own battles, spend our pocket-money as we chose, make the friends we wanted to make, and to rue the consequences of bad choices, and so on.

Maybe we were lucky, in a young city in a young country in an time period where children were thought to thrive best when not force-fed or watched too much. Are we better adults for it? I quess we'll see when this current crop of kids grows up and we can compare.

titular embellishment

never stop

Aside from the obvious problems with this, the culture of complete control it brings means that parents that use this stuff can never expect their sprogs to grow up and leave home. They wont be prepared socially for anything but holding onto mummies apron strings well into their 40s, 50s ??

Ahh

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

One could probably argue that usinig such technique to monitor children could be a violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child article 16 ("No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.").

1,200 children go missing every day in the US.

A rather large problem

From the pictures on that horrendous site, it looks like it runs on the iPhone - but I didn't think Apple liked background / call interception apps? So how exactly does this work? Does it require a jailbreak?

Trust

Seconded

Won't be giving my kids anything but a pay&go phone until they can pay their own bills. Pay&go is pretty limiting unless you can afford lots of credit. Once they're earning enough to pay for a contract then I think my authority to say who they can and can't talk to will be all but gone.

Some of the indignation this system is receiving over here may come from the different attitudes to what constitutes a child. As far as I'm concerned, anything above 16 might not be an adult, but since they can legally have sex and move out on their own, they're certainly not a child. They can drive at 17, which is somewhat more dangerous than using an IM client. Once they're 18 they can vote and drink, so they're adults and you have pretty much no right to interferer in their lives. Of course if your kid has shown they can't be trusted up to the age of 18, they still live under your roof, and I suppose if the phone wasn't bought with their own money, take it away.

They should definately....

....be ashamed of that fear-mongering website and most of the features offered by this app are deplorable and unecessary but I find myself thinking that stopping people from calling\texting whilst driving is a really good idea.

Especially for young people who, if they are anything like I was, are convinced they're invincible and will pay lip-service to the advice you give them but will do what the feck they want when out of sight.

Workarounds

My uncle recently tried to use a call blocking service on my much younger (17ish) cousin. Within 5 hours she had already used a hidden £20 to go and buy a new phone. He also tried putting web-filtering software on the family PC and locked down their accounts. That lasted about 10 minutes before they had learned how to get around it, in several ways including forcing the PC into 'safe mode' and creating new admin accounts.

Kids are not stupid and any system to monitor and restrict what they do will be thoroughly picked at. Remote control of your kids just isn't possible if they don't agree to it. What will make a difference, however, is raising them to be good people and to respect you.

The best and only method that works is Voice Control (A.K.A "Talking")

re:workarounds

THere are ways of locking down a computer so kids can't get into safe mode or the bios. This sounds like the parent wasnt smart enough to lock down his technology and the kids took advantage of it. If all your kids do is email, and websurfing and texting, install Linux on their computer and lock it down. I doubt they would have the smarts to unlock it.

I have to disagree and say that kids are inherantly stupid by nature and use whatever is in front of them to make their world seperate from the adult world, no mater how illegal it is or how many people get hurt, they dont care. It only revolves around them. Kids think they are the center of the universe.

I do agree that by talking to them a parent can make their child understand they are not the only one in this world and their actions have concequences that effect other people. Such as texting while driving could not only kill them but someone else.

Personally I dislike kids and have nothing but contempt for them and wish things were like the 19th century regarding them---that they should be seen and not heard until they are of legal age or consent.

May actually be illegal

In the US at least, there are laws (at the state level, I think) against intercepting telephone calls. And as far as I know they do not include an exception for parents. I doubt any parents have have been prosecuted for this, but there was a case where a conviction was thrown out because it was based largely on evidence obtained by an eavesdropping parent. A judge ruled that was in invasion privacy against both the child and, more importantly in this case, the other party to the call.

And another thing!

Parents have tried this and failed for years. When I was 12 my folks wanted me off the computer more so dad put a BIOS password on my machine. Took me all of about 5 minutes to figure out a way around that one. If you don't have time to parent your children don't have them to begin with. Anonymous so mom doesn't beat me again.